Tag Archives: Marxism

This site tends to use the term Marxist when referring to Obama when in fact he is both a socialist and a Marxist.

The same goes for Hillary Clinton, though she tends to espouse more Marxist leanings while still being a socialist. (Remember her failed health care plan of 1993)

by Sandra L. Campbell, Demand Media

Karl Marx laid the groundwork for Marxism, socialism and communism.

In political circles and polite conversation, people often use the terms ”Marxism,” ”socialism,” and ”communism” interchangeably, as if the three philosophies are the same.

However, they have important distinctions. Each philosophy builds upon the other. Marxism is the theoretical framework which lays the foundation for the economic and political philosophies of socialism and communism.

The Basics of Marxism

Karl Marx, writing with Friedrich Engels, developed a theory of social and economic principles and a sharp critique of the capitalist form of government in the mid-1800s. Marx believed that workers, under the capitalist system of government, sold their labor and that this labor became a commodity.

This commodity, or “labor power” translated into surplus value for the capitalist, but not for the worker. Marx concluded that this created an inherent conflict between the working class (proletariat) and the ownership class (the bourgeoisie).

Because capitalism has this “built in” inequality, Marx argued that the working class would eventually take power over the ruling class, reconstructing society. This reconstruction would take place in stages. The next stage after capitalism, according to Marx, would be a socialist form of government.

The Economics of Socialism

Socialism advocates public ownership of property and natural resources rather than private ownership. The socialist system of government values cooperation over the competitiveness of a free market economy.

Socialists believe that all people in society contribute to the production of goods and services and that those goods should be shared equally. This differs from the capitalist system in which individual efforts trump the collective and the free market determines the distribution of goods.

Examples of socialist policies include a living wage, free higher education and universal health care. Advocates of socialism believe that capitalism creates vast inequality and that it ultimately leads to imperialism, a hyper-form of capitalism.

Communism: The Last Stage

The communist doctrine differs from the socialist worldview because communism calls not only for public ownership of property and natural resources, but also for the means of production of goods and services.

Karl Marx argued that capitalism, with its strict adherence to free market principles, divided people because of competition. He believed communism was the solution. According to Marx, communism would give people a chance to develop into their very best.

He concluded that communism was a natural progression from socialism and would occur in two stages. First, the working class would gain control of society and push the ownership class out.

Second, society would evolve into a classless one without government. According to Britannica.com, Marx and Friedrich Engels defined communists in their “Communist Manifesto” as, “The most advanced and resolute section of the working class which parties every country, that section which pushes forward all others.”

Marxism, Socialism and Communism Throughout the World

Many countries have adopted various forms of Marxism, socialism and communism. The former Soviet Union is the most famous example of a communist system of government, lasting from 1922 to 1991.

The People’s Republic of China has a communist government, although, China has developed a more mixed market economy with private ownership and state ownership of entities such as media.

European countries like France, Italy and England have mixed economies with free market and socialist policies such as universal health care and free collegiate education.

The United States, a capitalist mixed economy, has examples of socialist policies such as public schools, libraries and health care support in the form of Medicaid and Medicare for low income people and senior citizens.

If you are a left-wing person it goes without saying. You want shared misery for all.

Dystopian features also include the muddled thinking of those believing our best days are behind us.

They are caught up in their own Fantasy Land.

Examples include:

It is the opposite of a utopia. Such societies appear in many artistic works, particularly in stories set in a future.

Dystopias are often characterized by dehumanization, totalitarian governments, environmental disaster, or other characteristics associated with a cataclysmic decline in society.

Dystopian societies appear in many sub-genres of fiction and are often used to draw attention to real-world issues regarding society, environment, politics, economics, religion, psychology, ethics, science, and/or technology, which if unaddressed could potentially lead to such a dystopia-like condition.

Famous depictions of dystopian societies include:

Man made Global Warming.

R.U.R. (which introduced the concept of Robots and the word Robot for the first time).

Nineteen Eighty-Four, which takes place in a totalitarian invasive super state; Brave New World, where the human population is placed under a caste of psychological allocation.

A Clockwork Orange, where the state undertakes to reform violent youths; Blade Runner in which genetically engineered replicants infiltrate society and must be hunted down before they injure humans.

Farhrenheit 451

The Hunger Games, in which the government controls its people by maintaining a constant state of fear through forcing randomly selected children to participate in an annual fight to the death.

Logan’s Run, in which both population and the consumption of resources are maintained in equilibrium by requiring the death of everyone reaching a particular age.

Soylent Green, where society suffers from pollution, overpopulation, depleted resources, poverty, dying oceans, and a hot climate. Much of the population survives on processed food rations, including “soylent green.”

and Divergent, where people must fit into one of five factions based on character traits: Selflessness, Bravery, Intelligence, Honesty, and Peace.

Those people who possess more than one quality are hunted down for fear that they will not conform and that their multi-trait personalities make them difficult to control.

In a phrase those who are dystopian share the delusion shared misery, their shared misery is the we the want “normal people” to conduct their lives.

They focus upon things like immigration knowing our economy is a mess attempting to make it a political hot button to insure more future democrats who will exchange their votes and rights the become indentured servants on Uncle Sam’s Plantation.

Voter ID is anathama to them because unless voting is rigged they know they can’t win.

Members of the progressive/left/ socialists or Marxists you are not Americans.

It’s impossible to be dystopian after heading the wonderful words spoken on a Memorial Day : We Are Americans”many years back and featured above.

Now the administration claims to be balking on sale of GM as it wouldn’t look good to not show a profit.

It didn’t seem to bother Obama and his minions with Solyndra and other failed green energy programs.

What good Marxist would want to give up that which now belongs to the state.

It is imperative that Obama be routed and control of the U.S. Senate returned to the hands of the Republicans so that many of these wrongs can be righted.

First on the list is Obama’s Health Care Denial and Rationing program.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it, I’m J.C. and I approve this message.

Obama’s wistful GM exit strategy

By MarketWatch

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) – The Wall Street Journal took a fresh look Monday at General Motors Co.’s efforts to end its awkward relationship with the U.S. Treasury.

The article, citing “people familiar with the government’s thinking,” states the government is reluctant to sell its 26.5% holding in GM because it would mean booking a loss on the bailout. That’s understandable. While it’s great to be able to point to all the jobs saved by the $50 billion bailout, any political currency gained by the White House would be a lot sweeter if it also made a profit on the deal.

That’s not happening. Not yet, anyway. GM GM -1.32% is currently trading at just under $24 a share, well below its $33 post-bankruptcy public offering in November 2010. The share price needs to reach $53 for the government to extract itself from GM without a loss.

General Motors assembly plant in Hamtramck, Mich.

What’s the likelihood of that happening? Much hinges on the success of GM’s heavily revamped lineup here at home, its ability to stem losses in Europe, and whether it can continue to grow sales in Asia. But with less than two months to go before the presidential election, investors won’t have enough information by then to judge whether GM’s performance on these three critical fronts has a realistic shot at lifting the share price past $53.

There can be little doubt why socialism as a pure economic model, the teachings of Karl Marx, and the failure of the U.S.S.R. with its supposed communism have failed.

Left to his own design, man will look out for his own self-interest, and working for the collective has never fit with mans human nature.

That is why when we hear the blather about the 99% and the so-called “Occupy Movement,” it’s just that, nonsense and blather.

Only those ignorant of economics and world history would say otherwise.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it, I’m J.C. and I approve this message.

Socialism—defined as a centrally planned economy in which the government controls all means of production—was the tragic failure of the twentieth century. Born of a commitment to remedy the economic and moral defects of capitalism, it has far surpassed capitalism in both economic malfunction and moral cruelty. Yet the idea and the ideal of socialism linger on. Whether socialism in some form will eventually return as a major organizing force in human affairs is unknown, but no one can accurately appraise its prospects who has not taken into account the dramatic story of its rise and fall.

The Birth of Socialist PlanningIt is often thought that the idea of socialism derives from the work of Karl Marx. In fact, Marx wrote only a few pages about socialism, as either a moral or a practical blueprint for society.

The true architect of a socialist order was Lenin, who first faced the practical difficulties of organizing an economic system without the driving incentives of profit seeking or the self-generating constraints of competition. Lenin began from the long-standing delusion that economic organization would become less complex once the profit drive and the market mechanism had been dispensed with—“as self-evident,” he wrote, as “the extraordinarily simple operations of watching, recording, and issuing receipts, within the reach of anybody who can read and write and knows the first four rules of arithmetic.”

In fact, economic life pursued under these first four rules rapidly became so disorganized that within four years of the 1917 revolution, Soviet production had fallen to 14 percent of its prerevolutionary level. By 1921 Lenin was forced to institute the New Economic Policy (NEP), a partial return to the market incentives of capitalism. This brief mixture of socialism and capitalism came to an end in 1927 after Stalin instituted the process of forced collectivization that was to mobilize Russian resources for its leap into industrial power.

The system that evolved under Stalin and his successors took the form of a pyramid of command. At its apex was Gosplan, the highest state planning agency, which established such general directives for the economy as the target rate of growth and the allocation of effort between military and civilian outputs, between heavy and light industry, and among various regions. Gosplan transmitted the general directives to successive ministries of industrial and regional planning, whose technical advisers broke down the overall national plan into directives assigned to particular factories, industrial power centers, collective farms, and so on. These thousands of individual subplans were finally scrutinized by the factory managers and engineers who would eventually have to implement them. Thereafter, the blueprint for production reascended the pyramid, together with the suggestions, emendations, and pleas of those who had seen it. Ultimately, a completed plan would be reached by negotiation, voted on by the Supreme Soviet, and passed into law.

Thus, the final plan resembled an immense order book, specifying the nuts and bolts, steel girders, grain outputs, tractors, cotton, cardboard, and coal that, in their entirety, constituted the national output. In theory such an order book should enable planners to reconstitute a working economy each year—provided, of course, that the nuts fitted the bolts; the girders were of the right dimensions; the grain output was properly stored; the tractors were operable; and the cotton, cardboard, and coal were of the kinds needed for their manifold uses. But there was a vast and widening gap between theory and practice.

Problems EmergeThe gap did not appear immediately. In retrospect, we can see that the task facing Lenin and Stalin in the early years was not so much economic as quasi military—mobilizing a peasantry into a workforce to build roads and rail lines, dams and electric grids, steel complexes and tractor factories. This was a formidable assignment, but far less formidable than what would confront socialism fifty years later, when the task was not so much to create enormous undertakings as to create relatively self-contained ones, and to fit all the outputs into a dovetailing whole.

Through the 1960s the Soviet economy continued to report strong overall growth—roughly twice that of the United States—but observers began to spot signs of impending trouble. One was the difficulty of specifying outputs in terms that would maximize the well-being of everyone in the economy, not merely the bonuses earned by individual factory managers for “overfulfilling” their assigned objectives. The problem was that the plan specified outputs in physical terms. One consequence was that managers maximized yardages or tonnages of output, not its quality. A famous cartoon in the satirical magazine Krokodil showed a factory manager proudly displaying his record output, a single gigantic nail suspended from a crane. ( More below)

Should the reader take D’Sousa’s comments to heart, “He is not motivated by the socialist or Marxist propaganda that hypnotized a whole generation of wooly–minded academics and condescending liberals—those concepts also leave him cold,”then every time I’ve called Obama a socialist or a Marxist I’ve been wrong.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it, I’m J.C. and i approve this message.

Dinesh D’Sousa, author and President, Kings College.

He’s been called many things: a socialist, a radical fellow traveler, a Chicago machine politician, a prince of the civil rights movement, a virtual second coming of Christ, or even a covert Muslim. But as New York Times bestselling author Dinesh D’Souza points out in this shockingly revealing book, these labels merely slap our own preconceived notions on Barack Obama.

The real Obama is a man shaped by experiences far different from those of most Americans; he is a much stranger, more determined, and exponentially more dangerous man than you’d ever imagined. He is not motivated by the civil rights struggles of African Americans in the 1960s—those battles leave him wholly untouched. He is not motivated by the socialist or Marxist propaganda that hypnotized a whole generation of wooly–minded academics and condescending liberals—those concepts also leave him cold.

“…D’Souza has made a stunning insight into Obama’s behavior, the most profound insight I have read in the last six years about Barack Obama.” —Newt Gingrich, Former Speaker of the House

What really motivates Barack Obama is an inherited rage—an often masked, but profound rage that comes from his African father; an anticolonialist rage against Western dominance, and most especially against the wealth and power of the very nation Barack Obama now leads. It is this rage that explains the previously inexplicable, and that gives us a startling look at what might lie ahead.

Years, and sometimes decades, pass between my visits to movie theaters. But I drove 30 miles to see the movie “2016,” based on Dinesh D’Souza’s best-selling book, “The Roots of Obama’s Rage.” Where I live is so politically correct that such a movie would not even be mentioned, much less shown.

Every seat in the theater was filled, even though there had been an earlier showing that day, and more showings were scheduled for the rest of the afternoon and evening. I had to sit on a staircase in the balcony, but it was worth it

The audience was riveted. You could barely hear a sound from them, or detect a movement, and certainly not smell popcorn. Yet the movie had no bombast, no violence, no sex and no spectacular visual effects.

Is wealth creation sustainable? Of course it is. I requires an informed electorate to vote the reprehensible maggots we continue to elect over and over again out the door. No time better then this coming November.

On the other hand since it is impossible to have a meaningful, fact based discussion with voters on the left possibly slapping the living shit out of them might pound some sense into them, baring that duct taping them to a tree the first week in November will get the job done.

While taping them one might mention under their breath, ” I hear it’s true that democrats can vote more than once from the grave.” “Are you up to prove you are totally committed to the cause?”

Believers in Free Market principles and individual liberty may be wondering why the Keynesians in the government (and the New York Times) have not figured out that their policies don’t work.

What is the definition of insanity again? Maybe insanity is holding to a belief in a social policy that is unsustainable despite economic truths. Basically, insanity is religiously maintaining a belief in a social structure that destroys human beings because . . . well, because.

If one is unfamiliar with the United Nations’ Agenda 21, one must get familiar with it . . . now.

How many times have you heard the word “sustainable” in the last four years? It seems like the most popular word in the media. So, I was curious. What is NOT sustainable? From the United Nations News Centre:

With the growth of both population and prosperity, especially in developing countries, the prospect of much higher resource consumption levels is “far beyond what is likely sustainable” if realized at all given finite world resources, the report warns.

The report calls for improving the rate of resource productivity or “doing more with less.”